Sleights Of Mind Part 9

The effect, called the Miser's Dream, is a cla.s.sic. It goes back at least as far as 1852, to the magician Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin, who called it the Shower of Money. Later it became known as the Aerial Treasury, until in 1895 T. Nelson Down named his version the Miser's Dream, a name that has stuck. For the trick, the magician continually plucks coins out of the air, seemingly from anywhere he wants, and tosses them into a receptacle. The act is traditionally done in silence except for the loud clanking of coins acc.u.mulating in the receptacle.

"Your natural inclination as an observer is to a.s.sume I am doing the same thing over and over again," says Teller. "Now I will tell you exactly what I did so you can see how devious we are."

SPOILER ALERT! THE FOLLOWING SECTION DESCRIBES MAGIC SECRETS AND THEIR BRAIN MECHANISMS!.

Teller explains that he began by palming five coins in his right hand. His left hand holds six more coins that are pinned with his fingers against the inside wall of the bucket. Some coins will drop from his right hand, and some from his left (which you cannot see) while he pretends to drop a coin from his right. In the latter case he is only faking the action of tossing from the right hand, using the flick-down motion to reconceal the coin. But the faked action engages your mirror neurons, so you are predisposed to see it as the same natural tossing action you yourself perform daily with coins, car keys, cooking ingredients, and so on. The clink of the coin dropping into the bucket from the left hand helps create the illusion that the fake-tossed coin from the right hand landed in the bucket. What we're actually seeing is the same coin flash in the right hand over and over and over again. Your a.s.sumptions have misled you.

Teller relies on misdirection and sleight of hand to create an illusion called the Miser's Dream. (Photographs Misha Gravenor) Teller says that the first coin raises the question in your mind: Where is it coming from? After four coins, you think you know. He has to be palming them in his right hand. Just then Teller reveals that his right hand is completely empty except for a single coin held between his thumb and index finger. You conclude there are no hidden coins. But wait. He is still dropping them, clink clink, into the bucket, only now they are coming from his left hand. "Every time you think you know what is happening, I am changing the method," he says. Every coin is a new little burst of sight and sound-you see it, you hear it, and it is all happening so fast you are deceived. You think any repet.i.tion is a real repet.i.tion.

END OF SPOILER ALERT.

Teller continues, "Your natural inclination as an observer is to a.s.sume that what I'm doing is the same thing over and over again. We take for granted that a repet.i.tion is a repet.i.tion [even] when it's not."

"We all infer cause and effect in everyday life," adds Teller. When A precedes B, we conclude that A causes B. The skilled magician takes advantage of this inference by making sure that A (a fake coin toss) always precedes B (a loud clink). However, A does not really cause B.

Teller's performance of the Miser's Dream reveals the human compulsion to find patterns in the world and to impose them even when they are not actually there. The magician milks your instinct to infer cause-and-effect relationships. This is similar to how magicians use your own expectations against you (as we discussed in chapter 8). But here we're talking about how magicians make you see correlations that aren't really there. They hijack your powerful abilities to detect patterns in the natural world, and then they trick you into drawing correlations between the unexpected, the ridiculous, and the absurd. They then pin your cognitive processes to the floor like a bully sitting on your chest as you wrestle with the contradictions your own mind conjured up.

As you saw with the Ouija board incident, this is the illusory correlation effect. In most circ.u.mstances, our inborn instinct for inferring cause-and-effect relationships serves us well. Want an egg? Look in a bird's nest. Dark clouds gathering overhead? Rain is likely, go find some shelter. That's all well and good, but causal inference is a highly imperfect, eminently fallible faculty. It goes amiss all the time and leads us to believe all kinds of things.

Illusory correlation is at the root of why some people honestly and in all good faith believe they are psychic. The telephone rings and you were thinking about the caller at that very moment. You sit down at your computer to write an e-mail to a friend only to discover that your friend has just written you about the same subject. You may know someone who believes he has predicted the future in a dream-a plane crash, say. But what he doesn't tell you is that he has premonitions of a plane crash several times a week. He tends not to notice or remember these false predictions, but the one that coincides with an actual plane crash sets off wild alert bells in his brain. His mental correlation detector is screaming Correct! True! Valid! In extreme cases, illusory correlation can lead to extraordinary beliefs, such as the ancient Aztec theory that a human sacrifice had to be performed each morning in order to make the sun rise. It's gruesome, and easy to condemn in hindsight, but to the Aztecs it worked every single morning, just as advertised.

In the second season of the television series Lost, plane crash survivors stranded on an island must push a mysterious b.u.t.ton every 108 minutes to "save the world" (prevent the occurrence of some undefined world-scale catastrophic event). Because the end of the world has not yet come, the b.u.t.ton must be working. But n.o.body ever fails to push the b.u.t.ton to find out for sure.

A related effect in the brain is called the availability bias. This illusion, caused by a failure of memory, pops up often in everyday life. For example, according to Steve, "I change our baby's diaper waaaay more than Susana does. Evidently because she's lazier than I am." But the puzzling thing is that Susana thinks exactly the opposite. She thinks she changes Brais's diapers more than Steve does. The fact is both of us are wrong. We each change Brais's diaper more or less equally often. But in our minds, our own contributions and sacrifices are magnified by the fact that we remember our own actions better than we remember those of others. We incorrectly draw stronger correlations between the facts that we remember than between facts that are provided by a third party.

Magicians are well aware of these little brain foibles, and they pump them like a lab rat on a cocaine lever. "Much of our life is devoted to understanding cause and effect," Teller says. "Magic provides a playground for those rational skills. It is the theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality but that, in our hearts, ought to. It is rather like a joke. There is a logical, even if nonsensical, progression to it. When the climax of a trick is reached, there is a little explosion of shivery pleasure when what we see collides with what we know about physical reality."

This "little explosion of shivery pleasure" can actually be studied in the laboratory. In 2009 a team of cognitive neuroscientists-led by Ben A. Parris and Gustav Kuhn of the universities of Exeter and Durham in England-used magic tricks to investigate the neural correlates of causal relationships etched in the brain through experience. In their study, they point out that a magician screws with your head when he puts a coin into his right hand, closes it, waves his left hand over his clenched fist, and then slowly opens his right hand. The coin, which you know must still be there, has vanished. Your implicit system of knowledge of cause and effect tells you that coins cannot disappear like that.

So what goes on in the brains of people who witness such tricks? To find out, the researchers scanned the brains of twenty-five people with fMRI as they watched video clips of various magic tricks and two closely related control conditions. For example, a trick might be like the one just mentioned: coin in hand, close hand, wave other hand, open hand where coin last seen, coin gone. A control condition would be: coin in hand, close hand, wave other hand, open hand where coin last seen, coin still there. A surprise condition would be: coin in hand, close hand, open hand, magician shows coin in his mouth.

The main finding was that two brain regions-with the mouthful names dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and left anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)-lit up when people watched the magic tricks. Research has shown that one of these areas, the ACC, detects conflict, whereas the other, the dlPFC, tries to resolve conflict-exactly what you would expect when a cause-and-effect relationship is violated. In the surprise condition, the conflict detecting area, the ACC, lit up along with another region of the prefrontal cortex called the ventrolateral strip, which has been found to register surprise. In the plain vanilla control condition, none of these areas showed increased activity. The researchers concluded that your ability to detect information that contradicts or challenges your established beliefs is crucial for learning about the world. The highlighted circuit seems to play a role in the neurobiology of disbelief.

Susana's sister, Carolina, all grown up into a slim, chestnut-haired beauty, is a supervising croupier in the casino of Leon, Spain. She has seen more than her fair share of customers whose thinking is dominated by a peculiar cognitive illusion beloved by magicians and charlatans the world over: the gambler's fallacy.

"Clients often ask, how long has it been since the number twenty came up?" says Carolina. "Well, we croupiers keep track of every spin of the wheel, and since there is no rule against it, we truthfully answer ninety-six b.a.l.l.s ago." And why should it be against the rules? It plays in the house's favor that customers are drawn along by the illusion that knowing the past will help them predict the future. Carolina explains that modern roulette wheels come outfitted with electronic counters that conveniently provide various statistics for the gamblers' "benefit," such as the numbers corresponding to the last fifteen b.a.l.l.s, the percentage of black versus red numbers, the "hot" or most frequent numbers, or the more frequent dozens (numbers 1 through 12, numbers 13 through 24, or numbers 25 through 36). Of course none of these statistics changes the fact that the ball has exactly 1 in 36 chances of landing on any given number on the next spin.40 It should come as no surprise that Carolina, like many croupiers, doesn't herself gamble.

The gambler's fallacy is the mistaken belief that the likelihood of an event increases when a long period has elapsed since the event last occurred. If you're in a drought, it feels more likely that it should rain tomorrow. If you and your spouse have had four daughters in a row, it feels likely that you'll have a boy the next time. And when you're gambling, if it's been a very long time since the ball landed on 20 on the roulette wheel, it feels as if the likelihood of an impending 20 is high.

One of the most memorable examples of the gambler's fallacy took place at the ornate Monte Carlo casino in 1913. Elegantly dressed gamblers stood around a roulette wheel and watched as the ball landed on black twenty-six times in a row. With increasing excitement, many patrons began betting on red. It just had to come up next. Sure, the wheel is random, but it had to "self-correct," right?

Wrong. We all succ.u.mb to the superst.i.tion that when we observe a random process with a deviation, then logically the imbalance will have to even itself out. For example, ask yourself, if you toss a coin seven times, which is more likely to be the result? Heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads. Or tails, tails, tails, tails, tails, tails, tails. Or heads, tails, tails, heads, tails, heads, heads.

Answer: they are all the same. Each is an in dependent fair toss. The coin has no memory. If you toss twenty tails, the probability of flipping another tails is one in two. You can choose the same lottery numbers every time or change them every time, but either way you are equally likely to win an individual lottery draw. You could use the numbers that won the previous day and have the same probability of winning. The universe does not carry a memory of past results that will favor or disfavor future outcomes.

Two Goats and a Car.

In September 1990, the "Ask Marilyn" advice column in Parade magazine posed the following puzzle. Suppose you are in a game show and you're given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door-say, number one-and the host, who knows what's behind all the doors, opens another door-say number three-which he knows conceals a goat. You look at the goat as he says to you, "Do you want to stick with door number one or switch to door number two?" What should you do? Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

The puzzle, known as the Monty Hall problem after the host of the popular American television game show Let's Make a Deal, tests your ability to a.s.sess probabilities. You don't know which of the two remaining doors hides the prize, and so you may think, hey, the odds are fifty-fifty. It feels right to stick with door number one. But you'd be wrong. According to experts on probability, you should always switch. Choosing door two doubles the probability of winning the car from one-third to two-thirds. The Monty Hall problem arises because the contestant correctly believes that there is a 1 in 3 chance of selecting the car door in the initial door choice. But the host then removes a goat door from the remaining two doors. Now, if the contestant did indeed choose a car door in the original round (a 1 in 3 chance), then the remaining door will contain a goat. But if the contestant chose a goat door in the original round (a 2 in 3 chance), then the remaining door will contain the car. So it's twice as likely that the contestant's original choice was a goat rather than a car, and since it is certain that one of the remaining doors must hide the car, it is always in the contestant's best interest to switch.

The trouble is, the solution doesn't feel right. It doesn't match your intuition. And you are not alone. When the puzzle was first published, many scientists, including one or two n.o.bel Prize winners, were outraged by the correct solution because it did not feel right to them, either. Equal probability is deeply rooted in intuition.

The gambler's fallacy may manifest when a gambler suspects that a roulette wheel is rigged. If no red shows up after a long string of blacks, the player may a.s.sume that the wheel is not on the up and up. Someone must be cheating. Mentalists have taken this observation to heart and devised what they call the "too perfect" theory in magic. When producing a series of continuous predictions (for example, divining what's written on a bunch of notecards collected from the audience), magicians will often elect to get a few predictions wrong. They reason that psychic ability should be imperfect. After all, if the magician or psychic gets every prediction exactly right, the act ceases to look supernatural. If the mentalist never misses, the audience a.s.sumes the trick is "rigged" and not psychic.

What are the Odds?

In 1937, Susana's grandfather Enrique Garcia Casal, then twenty-two years old, was conscripted into the Spanish Civil War, an epic three-year struggle between an army led by General Francisco Franco and the democratically elected government, the Second Spanish Republic. During the last few days of the war, Enrique found himself aboard an armada headed for Cartagena, a Mediterranean coastal paradise, and one of the last Republican strongholds. He and his fellow soldiers had been told that Cartagena just surrendered. The war was nearly over and their job would be to occupy the defeated city.

Unfortunately for them, the fleeing Republican army had maintained control of the Cartagena coastal batteries and Enrique's ship, the Castillo de Olite, was in its sights. Franco's navy called for the armada's retreat but the Castillo de Olite's radio was broken and it continued toward the harbor, fully intent on landing its troops.

A floatplane circled and waved. "What a wonderful welcome surprise!" Enrique thought. In actuality, the floatplane was sent by the Republicans as a last-ditch effort to warn off the boat. Remember, this was a civil war: n.o.body wanted to kill a ma.s.sive ship full of sitting ducks when they were fellow countrymen. Why there might be family members on board!

Finally, the leader of the coastal batteries ordered that the ship be sunk. When the guns first fired, Enrique and his fellow soldiers rejoiced at the impressive welcoming salute. So it came as a big surprise when a round from the huge Vickers guns. .h.i.t the water nearby. A giant plume of water and foam sprayed into the air.

Enrique was at the stern of the ship when a round hit the bow. A second explosion sent debris and body parts flying in every direction. Crew and soldiers began to abandon ship. Enrique looked down to discover he was grazed at waist height with shrapnel. He bled as he considered that, had he been standing two inches to the side, he probably would have been a goner.

Half crazed, Enrique took off running and swan-dived off the boat. He was a strong swimmer and moved quickly away. Of the 636 men who made it off the sinking ship, Enrique was one of the last to jump.

And that's when the situation went from horrible to absurd. Enrique's cousin from his hometown of A Coruna, a city in Spain's far northwest, stopped Enrique in the middle of the Mediterranean and pointed out that he was swimming toward Africa, rather than the closer sh.o.r.es of Spain. Enrique was astonished to see his close relative. They turned, swam to a small island in the Cartagena harbor, and were rescued by the lighthouse keeper and his wife. The Republican army captured them and held them prisoner for the short remainder of the war.

Susana's family tells this story as if it were evidence of divine intervention. What, they ask themselves, are the chances that you are party to the greatest maritime disaster in Spanish history, on a boat with thousands of random soldiers, and you happen to run into (well, swim into) your cousin, who you didn't even know was on board? Surely the probability is small. But is it as minuscule as it seems?

Consider that Enrique was one of eight children and his father also had seven siblings. Enrique had dozens of first and second cousins, all about the same age, living in or around the same city. Half of these cousins were men and many would have been conscripted at the same time. Moreover, the military commonly drafted troops by the truckload and kept them more or less grouped in their units according to neighborhood. Indeed, the vast majority of the men on Enrique's ship were from the same part of Spain, so the likelihood that he would run into a cousin in the water could have been as high as 10 percent.

It is extremely easy to miscalculate probabilities and to a.s.sign inordinate significance to merely unlikely events. In magic shows, mentalists are masters at promoting unlikely events to the point that they seem impossible. In this way, only magic or some other divine intervention can seemingly explain the effect, when, in fact, if you actually inspect the series of small coincidences that led to the outcome, it's not so very surprising.

Of all the ways you can be suckered in by the supernatural, putting your faith in a psychic arguably tops the list. Mind reading as performed by magicians is one thing; they have mastered elaborate tricks that allow them to be in full control of events. In their "hot readings" (mentioned in chapter 7) they learn as much as they can about you before the show by trawling the Internet or government records, overhearing conversations, or even lifting your wallet for a quick peek. As we saw in chapter 9, they also trick you into picking specific words or numbers that feel like free choices. Armed with this knowledge, they appear to read your mind by regurgitating what they know about you.

Psychics, on the other hand, are not magicians. Although they may occasionally rely on hot readings, they are fundamentally masters of so-called cold readings, which are not meant to entertain you but to gain your trust and, all too often, defraud you. In a cold reading a magician, mentalist, or psychic draws information out of you to give you the impression that he is reading your mind. The method relies on an ability to sense unconscious behavior and to spin out vague statements that fit anyone's situation. The deception is all linguistic. There is nothing supernatural about it.

Nevertheless, we wondered whether psychics might have anything to teach us about the neuroscience of human behavior. Even if what they do is all trickery and hok.u.m, maybe psychics are fundamentally geniuses of the mind, like magicians and mentalists, and we should be studying them, too, to improve neuroscience.

In April 2010, we dug out our tie-dyed T-shirts and headed off to Sedona, Arizona, to attend a psychic fair. We could feel the "positive energy" as we approached beautiful red rock formations eroded from the iron-rich landscape. Psychics, faith healers, and New Age entrepreneurs populate the area and a.s.sert that Sedona is one of fourteen power points on earth that can "ground the vibrational frequencies" coming in from extraterrestrial sources. (The other hot spots are Haleakala in Hawaii, Mount Shasta and the Golden Gate Bridge in California, the Black Hills of South Dakota, Central Park in New York City, Machu Picchu in Peru, Mount Olympus and Delphi in Greece, j.a.pan's Mount Fuji, the Great Pyramids, Popocatepetl and Palenque in Mexico, and the Ganges River.) We arrived at the Radisson Poco Diablo Resort expecting incensefilled tents and teepees, drumming circles, and Grateful Dead CDs. But there was none of that. Instead we found an older crowd of people wearing clothes from Target and T.J. Maxx. They would fit right in at the outlet mall near our home.

Going to this event felt a bit like going to a casino. At most casinos we have visited (quite a few, recently!), attendees aren't happy-go-lucky vacationers enjoying themselves. Rather, many seem worried and desperate to win. You can't help but wonder if the person standing next to you is having the worst day of his or her life. The psychic fair had a similar feeling of desperation. Many people seemed to possess the vain hope that a psychic would help them recover from some major personal disaster. As scientists with the professional and personal perspective that every single service and product offered at the fair amounted to so much horse manure, we found it really depressing.

The wares were astonishing. You could buy "quantum accelerated" flashlights, pendants, and laser pointers to shield you from the negative frequencies of cell phones, laptop computers, and radio waves. You could acquire a silicone bracelet to bring you balance, health, and power by "aligning the protons of your body" (which, if true, would turn you into a magnet, though the vendors were not aware of this fact). Creams and ointments to pull the negative energy from wounds and cancers were on sale. A man named Elvis had a Polaroid camera in a box with a rapidly changing color-wheeled lamp inside. It produced a picture of Steve surrounded by mystical colored blobs, which Elvis explained were Steve's guardian angels, spirits, and energies. Elvis smiled and said, "Thirty-three dollars, please."

The rest of the vendors were psychics or astrologers who did readings for a fee of anywhere from $15 per fifteen minutes to $35 per half hour. Some used tarot or other types of cards, some grabbed your hands and went into an immediate trance, and some gave either Western or Asian style ma.s.sages to rid the body of negative frequencies. Did you know that fifth-dimensional quantum healing is extremely effective in third eye and DNA activation?

To avoid the possibility of a hot reading, we did not reveal our last names (to ensure that the psychics couldn't simply perform an Internet search and dig up facts about us), nor did we give detailed information about ourselves.41 Our cover story was that we had come for advice on how to raise our kids in harmony with nature in this crazy technology-ridden world. We also wanted to find out more about an object that Susana owns. We have a small collection of miniature toy soldiers, some of which are quite old and valuable. The latest addition is an aluminum toy depicting a British soldier from the 1760s on the march with his musket on his shoulder. Susana had found it as a prize inside a Kinder chocolate egg purchased from a sweets shop sometime in the 1980s.

But we didn't tell our four psychics any of that. Instead, Susana told them that she had found the soldier lodged between two planks of wood in her old rented apartment in Boston and that she felt a special connection to the toy. She also told them that she was thinking of going back to school (Susana has a PhD in medicine and surgery, no further schooling required) and asked for advice on what to do.

Each of the psychics had a slightly different method of reading Susana's mind. Some plied cards; others hummed as they held her hands from across the table. They looked at her intently, held the little soldier, and concentrated to accomplish the "psychometric" readings of the toy's history and significance.

SPOILER ALERT! THE FOLLOWING SECTION DESCRIBES MAGIC SECRETS AND THEIR BRAIN MECHANISMS!.

How to do a Cold Reading.

Teller says that a cold reading involves teasing out information from a client with questions phrased as statements. "I sense you've got an issue or problem that's concerning you." Of course they do. Otherwise why would they be there? Everybody worries about health, money, love, and death. So if you say, "I sense some problem with your health" and they don't respond, you continue without skipping a beat: "I don't mean your physical health. It's your emotional...or financial health." And so forth. Every statement is made with rising inflection, grammatically a statement, but inviting completion as a question. You miss a lot of the time, but people forget the misses and remember the hits.

Flatter your subject shamelessly. Remember, the psychic succeeds by telling you what you want to believe. Ham it up. Don't blurt out "You like ice cream." Look deeply into the crystal ball, the guy's palm, tea leaves, tarot cards, food stains on his shirt-whatever-and slowly show an expression of insight and discovery: "Your rising moon in the Milky Way tells me you like ice cream." The bigger the ham, the more he'll swear by your powers. "That's amazing! I love ice cream."

Base questions on the client's stage of life. According to the mentalist Derren Brown, people in their twenties tend to be quite self-involved, wondering what their real self consists of. Older people may be more worried about illness and death. Make empty truisms-"You are sometimes introverted"-sound substantial. Leave everything wide open. For example, you might say, "You are very creative, but it may not be that you specifically, say, paint, it may be that your creativity shows itself in more subtle ways." If the person paints, bingo, you're a mind reader. If not, you are flattering the person's inner creativity.

Always ask: Who's Michael? Or Linda, or a similarly common name that the victim will likely match or suggest a variation, like Mike or Mitch, Lynn or Lynette, etc. Never go with "Who's Bathsheba?" Unless, of course, you've nailed everything 100 percent and want to aim for a grand slam finish. Remember, as a psychic, you're not constrained by either time or the truth. If there's no one in the present with that name, you ask if they ever knew someone in the past, and if that fails, shift to the future with a worried expression, saying, "Be careful when you meet someone named Bathsheba, I sense difficulties, possibly a betrayal..."

END OF SPOILER ALERT.

The readings were all over the place. One psychic claimed the toy soldier was not a child's toy at all but a chess piece cast in the 1940s, then belonging to a gentleman named Aiken. Another claimed that the toy was a German soldier (it's a British soldier) and that the connection Susana feels is due to the fact that Susana lived in the same place in Germany that the soldier was from, when she was a scullery maid in a past life. Another said that the toy depicted Susana from a previous life. "It's you when you were Caesar, no wait, one of Caesar's generals. Who was Caesar again? Was he some kind of king?"

As for Susana's immediate future, two psychics said her guardian spirits wanted her to go back to school, while the others noticed that we came to the fair with our two young children and said the spirits wanted Susana to stay home with them. Given that Susana spent fourteen years on her education and has never considered giving up her career, both prognostications were ludicrous-but they could have been reasonable bets for many new mothers.

We concluded that if magicians are artists of attention and awareness, psychics are poseurs of false wizardry. The ones we met in Sedona showed little insight or sophistication. Their method was to ply and probe clients to determine their desires and then, for a price, sell them the promise of those desires. The industry is thriving because people are desperate to confirm that everything is going to be all right, that their decisions have been good ones and will continue to be good ones, and that they will be reunited with their loved ones on the "other side."

How can you defend yourself against psychics, frauds, high-pressure salespeople, priests, politicians, and anybody else who uses cold-reading techniques to get your money? We are not claiming that all people who choose these walks of life are consciously fraudulent. Many believe in their methods and genuinely feel they are helping lost souls. If people walk away from a psychic feeling better about themselves, then no harm done. But some psychics are scammers who use cold-reading techniques to lie to you and take your money. As in all commercial ventures, buyer beware.

Mentalists and psychics often tell you exactly what you want to hear. The psychics who read Susana's "future" changed their story based on her body language and facial expressions. When she smiled and nodded the "clairvoyants" were encouraged to expound on a particular topic, but when she raised or knitted her eyebrows, they would revise the preceding statement. "I see success in your future" one of the psychics said. Susana frowned and tried her best puzzled expression. "Not professionally" the "psychic" immediately corrected, "I mean you will have successful, meaningful personal relationships." Susana smiled and relaxed her shoulders. The self-proclaimed visionary also relaxed visibly.

Some salespeople use similar methods to "read your mind." Next time you go buy an expensive item and suspect the seller is being less than truthful, try changing your story along the way: for instance, tell the salesperson that you are interested in the safety features of a specific car rather than in its design, then change your mind after a while and say that you are really interested in design more than in safety. If the car's best selling points change according to your stated needs, then the salesperson is not honest about the product but is telling you what you want to hear.

One final question: Why, if cold reading is so lame, do people buy it? What makes your brain vulnerable to all the flattery and linguistic legerdemain? People fall for it because, in fact, cold reading is a fundamental component of all human social interactions. Normal polite discourse demands that we seek to determine the needs of our interlocutors in any conversation. We aim to be sensitive, to be charming, to be good listeners. It's how we treat each other civilly. Psychics capitalize and expand on this natural tendency.

Psychic Blunders.

Houdini was an early debunker of frauds and charlatans in magic and science, and he took part in a committee overseen by Scientific American magazine to scientifically investigate so-called psychics. Houdini's skeptical fervor came from his own previous desperate attempts to contact his dead mother. He tried multiple venues to speak to her; all failed. In one of them, the medium (the wife of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) famously channeled Houdini's mother for him. She told Harry how much she loved him and how proud she was of him. Too bad Harry's real name was Ehrich and his mother only ever spoke to him in German. Disillusioned and embittered by the experience, Harry Houdini took it upon himself to expose mediums and psychics as mere tricksters.

An iconic vision of the menacing magician involves placing a hapless person from the audience into a hypnotic trance. Svengali. You are getting sleeeepy. A scam, right?

Not so fast. According to our colleagues who study the brains of people who are p.r.o.ne to trancelike states, hypnosis is not necessarily hocuspocus. The age-old practice profoundly alters neural circuits involved in perception and decision making, changing what people see, hear, feel, and believe to be true. Recent experiments led people who were hypnotized to "see" colors where there were none. Others lost the ability to make simple decisions. Some people looked at common English words and thought they were gibberish.

The experiments were led by Amir Raz, a cognitive neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, who is an amateur magician. We've never met him, but we like him already. Raz wanted to do something really impressive that other neuroscientists could not ignore. So he hypnotized people and gave them the Stroop test. In this cla.s.sic paradigm, you are shown words in block letters that are colored red, blue, green, or yellow. But here's the rub. Sometimes the word "red" is colored green. Or the word "yellow" is shown in blue. You have to press a b.u.t.ton stating the correct color. Reading is so deeply engrained in our brains that it will take you a little bit longer to override the automatic reading of a word like "red" and press a b.u.t.ton that says "green."42 Sixteen people, half of them highly hypnotizable and half of them resistant, came into Raz's lab. (The purpose of the study, they were told, was to investigate the effects of suggestion on cognitive performance.) After each person underwent a hypnotic induction, Raz gave them these instructions: Very soon you will be playing a computer game inside a brain scanner. Every time you hear my voice over the intercom, you will immediately realize that meaningless symbols are going to appear in the middle of the screen. They will feel like characters in a foreign language that you do not know, and you will not attempt to attribute any meaning to them.

This gibberish will be printed in one of four ink colors: red, blue, green, or yellow. Although you will only attend to color, you will see all the scrambled signs crisply. Your job is to quickly and accurately depress the key that corresponds to the color shown. You can play this game effortlessly. As soon as the scanning noise stops, you will relax back to your regular reading self.

Raz then ended the hypnosis session, leaving each person with what is called a posthypnotic suggestion-an instruction to carry out an action while not hypnotized. Days later, they entered the brain scanner.

In highly hypnotizables, when the instruction came over the intercom, the Stroop effect was obliterated, Raz said. They saw English words as gibberish and named colors instantly.

But those who were resistant to hypnosis could not override the conflict, he said. The Stroop effect prevailed, rendering them significantly slower in naming the colors.

When the brain scans of the two groups were compared, a distinct pattern appeared. In the hypnotizables, Raz found, the visual area of the brain that usually decodes written words did not become active. And a region in the front of the brain that usually detects conflict was similarly dampened. Top-down processes overrode circuits devoted to reading and detecting conflict. Most of the time people see what they expect to see and believe what they already believe-unless hypnosis trips up their brain circuitry. Most of the time, bottom-up information matches top-down expectation, but hypnosis creates a mismatch. You imagine something different, so it is different.

The top-down nature of human cognition goes far to explain not only hypnosis but also the extraordinary powers of placebos (a sugar pill will make you feel better), nocebos (a witch doctor can make you ill), talk therapy, meditation, and magical stagecraft. We are not saying that hypnosis can cure your cancer, but these effects all demonstrate that suggestion can physically alter brain function.

Magicians use suggestibility, hypnosis, and the illusion of choice to control the path of our behavior during a performance. We come away mystified as to how they could have known what we would do in a given situation, when in fact they were controlling our minds the whole time.

Decades of research suggest that about 10 to 15 percent of adults are hypnotizable. Up to age twelve, before top-down circuits mature, 80 to 85 percent of children are highly hypnotizable. One in five adults is flat-out resistant to hypnosis. The rest are in between, p.r.o.ne to occasional hypnotic states such as losing all sense of time and surroundings while driving on a monotonous highway or watching a spectacular sunset. No one knows what makes one person more or less hypnotizable, although certain subtypes of a gene called COMT may confer susceptibility.

But those who are susceptible can be identified with the help of standard questionnaires and interview techniques. Many are complicit in that they believe hypnotism is effective. They expect it to work, so it does.

Brain scans show that the control mechanisms for deciding what to do in the face of conflict become uncoupled when people are hypnotized. They are then open to suggestion. Thinking that a medicine will relieve pain is enough to prompt the brain to release its own natural painkillers. People who expect pain not to be as bad as it actually is experience a reduction in pain equivalent to that achieved by a shot of morphine. Hyperactive children who are given a "dose extender" in full knowledge that it is an inactive pill can reduce their regular medication by half with no ill effects. Hypnosis and placebos are effective anesthetics. They are used for treating anxiety, tension, depression, phobias, addictions, asthma, allergy, high blood pressure, and many other medical conditions.

In all these instances, top-down processes override bottom-up information. People think that sights, sounds, and touch from the outside world const.i.tute reality. But the brain constructs what it perceives based on past experience.

Hypnosis provides a window into exploring the human condition. We all color reality based on our experiences, expectations, suggestions, and beliefs. The fact that these are shaped in large part by culture, family upbringing, advertising, peer pressure, and spiritual inclination is fodder for many fascinating future studies.

Paul Zak, a neuroscientist, amateur magician, and director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California, likes to tell a story about himself when he was a teenager. Crazy about cars, Zak took a job at a gas station on the outskirts of Santa Barbara, California. "You see a lot of interesting things working the night shift in a sketchy neighborhood," he says. "I constantly saw people making bad decisions: drunk drivers, gang members, unhappy cops, and con men. In fact, I was the victim of a cla.s.sic con called the pigeon drop."

Zak recalls that he met a man coming out of the restroom with a pearl necklace. "Found it on the bathroom floor," the guy said. "Geez, looks nice. I wonder who lost it?" Just then the phone rang and another man asked if anyone had found a pearl necklace. He had just bought it for his wedding anniversary. He offered a $200 reward for the necklace's return. Zak, feeling happy to help, told the man that a customer had just found it. "Okay," the man said, "I'll be there in thirty minutes." Zak gave the gas station's address and the man gave his phone number.

But all was not well. The man who found the necklace said he was late for a job interview and could not wait for the other fellow to arrive. What to do? "Hmm. Why don't I give you the necklace and we split the reward?" Zak felt his greed-o-meter go off in his head, suppressing all rational thought. "Yeah," said Zak, "you give me the necklace to hold and I'll give you a hundred bucks." The deal was made. Zak, who earned minimum wage, didn't have a hundred dollars, so he took the money out of the cash drawer-just as a loan, of course.

The rest is predictable. The man with the lost necklace never showed up. He did not answer phone calls. Finally, Zak called the police, who told him that the necklace was a two-dollar fake and that his calls had gone to a pay phone nearby. Deflated, Zak confessed to his boss and repaid the money out of his next paycheck.

Zak, today a leading authority on the neurobiology of trust, is interested in finding out why cons such as the pigeon drop work. He also wonders why people suspend their disbelief in the presence of magicians.

The answer may lie in oxytocin, the hormone released during childbirth, breast feeding, social recognition, and cooperation. Zak and his colleagues have carried out numerous studies showing that oxytocin makes acts of cooperation feel really, really good. When you feel trusted, your brain releases oxytocin, and that causes you to reciprocate the trust. If you inhale oxytocin in a laboratory experiment, your generosity to strangers skyrockets.

Zak a.s.serts that con men and magicians are equally adept at causing your brain to squirt oxytocin to make you trust them. But in this seduction they use different techniques and have different ends in mind.

The key to a con, says Zak, is not that you trust the con man, but that he shows he trusts you. Con men ply their trade by appearing fragile or needing help, by seeming vulnerable. Because of oxytocin and its effect on other parts of the brain, you feel good when you help others. "I need your help" is a potent stimulus for action. As for the pigeon con, the first hook was Zak's desire to help the poor guy get this nice gift to his undoubtedly sweet wife. The second hook was the man who wanted to give the necklace back but who was late for his interview. If only Zak could help him get that job. Zak's oxytocin system was in high gear, urging him to reciprocate the trust he had been shown and to help these people. Only then did greed kick in. "Hey," thought Zak, "I can help both men, make a wife happy, and walk away with a hundred bucks-what a deal!" Yes, suspend all suspicion and give up the cash. Cons often work better when an accomplice poses as an innocent bystander who "just wants to help," says Zak. We are social creatures, after all, and we often do what others think we should do.

Boxing Fraud-Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.

What if you received an e-mail from an a.n.a.lyst who said he had a system for predicting the winners of certain upcoming boxing matches with 100 percent accuracy. He can predict the outcome of only a few fights, but he knows exactly which fights are possible to predict and in those cases the prediction can be made several days ahead of time based on the characteristics of the fighters and other secret factors. He doesn't expect you to believe him and he's not asking you for anything. He'll prove the system to you by sending you the predictions ahead of time. You needn't reply and you can do anything you want with the prediction, including ignore it or make bets on it. For example, in two days there will be a fight: Boxer A will beat Boxer B.

You don't reply to the e-mail, but out of curiosity you check the outcome of the fight online and find that, indeed, Boxer A won.